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Man Arrested for Creating Fake Bands With AI, Then Making $10 Million by Listening to Their Songs With Bots

An alleged scammer has been arrested under suspicion that he used AI to create a wild number of fake bands — and fake music to go with them — and faking untold streams with more bots to earn millions in ill-gotten revenue.

In a press release, the Department of Justice announced that investigators have arrested 52-year-old North Carolina man Michael Smith, who has been charged with a purportedly seven-year scheme that involved using his real-life music skills to make more than $10 million in royalties.

Indicted on three counts involving money laundering and wire fraud, the Charlotte-area man faces a maximum of 20 years per charge.

bruhsoulz ,

Fyi Spotify has been doing stuff like this for years, hire dirt cheap artists, make up a fake artist/band name, upload generic jingles and implant them on every single category playlist they can. Prime example are playlists for things that don’t have too much complexity like lo-fi, calm piano, stuff like that. Disgusting. Edit: u can spot them out by digging thru some of the “artists”, and when u find one with fishy profile try looking them up on other platforms. Millions of plays on Spotify but nearly nonexistent outside of it? That’s a plant😂

lewdian69 ,

How would that benefit Spotify if they are the ones paying the royalties to themselves? Wouldn’t that be net zero?

Juice260 ,
@Juice260@lemmy.world avatar

Isn’t that all that Facebook and Twitter is though?

Rozz ,

What a smart use of the system. too bad for him.

sleen ,

Government when the elites use loopholes and do devious shit:

I sleep

Government when the peasants use loopholes:

Straight to jail

MentalEdge ,
@MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz avatar

TBF, this particular loophole doesn’t take any money from the streaming services. Quite the opposite, it massively inflates their stats.

And while it does siphon money from the big labels, it also impacts small indie artists just trying to earn enough from each play to get to eat.

Yeah, this guy is in trouble because he stepped on some big toes, but he curb-stomped a bunch of little guys, too.

GluWu , (edited )

So corporations use ai and bots themselves in order to inflate their stats and steal money from investors and share holders(see Reddit) and its all cool. Someone does that but it costs the corporation some money. Straight to jail.

Seriously, how has the reddit IPO which was offered to users not been a fraudulenty scheme due to the website statistics being based on genuine user interaction with no mention of auto reposting or bots that are either operated by or hired by reddit?

It genuinely seems like the next ponzi scheme but that would require so many federal agencies that stopped giving shit and learning how the world works to see any peep into that business.

But what do I know, I’m just some average Joe that gets audited over a $300 mistake on annual taxs which I have to pay a private third party more than that to do.

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